Should've Gone Hunting Instead 1/1 (Supernatural)
Should’ve Gone Hunting Instead
By iamstealthyone
Summary: Sam and Dean set out to enjoy some R&R at a nice little condo in Arizona. It doesn’t go well.
Characters: Sam and Dean.
Rating: PG-13 for some cussing and sexual references. Genfic.
Word count: 5,300
Disclaimer: Don’t own them. Not making money off of them.
Author’s notes: Many thanks to swanseajill for the beta read. She not only made this a better story, but also helped me settle on a title.
I.
“I have to admit, this is pretty awesome,” Dean said as he surveyed the view from their back porch, late-afternoon sun mellow overhead and breeze brushing against his skin.
It wasn’t like he’d never been to a scenic spot like this before. He had, a few dozen times. But those visits had always been for dangerous hunts, or hellish camping trips, or grueling training exercises. Not to sit around and chill out.
This time, though, it was all about the R&R.
Thanks to one of Sam’s friends, they had a free, two-night stay in a 1,000-square-foot condo in Greer, Arizona. The condo sat just off the Little Colorado River, in the middle of pine trees and aspens that gave the air a clean, crisp smell.
As Dean listened to the river rushing by like a muted rainstorm, his entire body relaxing as if he’d stretched out on the world’s most kick-ass mattress, Sam walked up and whistled.
“What a view.” Sam smiled, then hitched a thumb toward the condo. “This place is way better than the crappy motels we usually stay at.”
It was, especially the last one. A dozen dead platypuses had been stuffed and strategically placed around their room. Dean hadn’t been able to decide what was creepier: the two clinging to the ceiling fan or the one mounted on the wall behind the toilet.
“Did you see the beds?” Sam asked, leaning against the porch railing.
Dean nodded. He had. One king, one queen, both with wrought-iron headboards -- which rocked from a hunter’s perspective -- more pillows than anyone could possibly need, and soft sheets that the average person would take for granted.
“And then there’s the … ” Sam’s voice trailed off as his gaze drifted over Dean’s shoulder, and his face lit up like a stripper had just given him a top-of-the-line computer.
Okay, so the stripper was more Dean’s fantasy than Sam’s, but --
“Squirrel!” Sam whispered.
“Huh?”
“Squirrel!” he repeated, pointing.
Sure enough, a squirrel was scurrying across the ground in front of the porch. It stopped and peered up at them, then scampered away in a hyper streak of fur, grass rustling in its wake.
Turning toward Sam, Dean snorted. “Dude. You’d think you’d never seen a squirrel before.”
Sam’s grin faded, a balloon popped, and guilt smacked Dean upside the head. The past year had sucked, hard, and Sammy deserved happiness wherever he could find it.
“It’s kind of cool, I guess,” Dean allowed. “I mean, we don’t see squirrels this close up too often. Or if we do, whatever thing we’re hunting has ripped them in half.”
Okay. So words really weren’t Dean’s thing.
“You’re such an ass,” Sam said, but he was grinning again, fond exasperation, and that was good enough for Dean.
---
“This is weird,” Sam said as they trudged up the stairs to their separate bedrooms. The long drive that afternoon, four games of Battleship, and two burgers apiece, heavy on the cheese, had forced them to call it a night at nine-thirty. “We always sleep in the same room.”
Dean snickered as he followed Sam up, their footsteps finding the occasional weak, creaking spot on the stairs. “Don’t worry, Sammy. If you get too scared in your big-boy bed, you can come cuddle with me.”
Sam stopped, threw a glare at Dean, and resumed his ascent.
---
Two hours later, Dean was scowling at the ceiling, sheets a rumpled mess from tossing and turning as he’d tried, unsuccessfully, to get to sleep.
It totally wasn’t because Sam was in a different room.
---
Forty-eight minutes and two seconds later, Dean crept down the hallway to the next room, carpet a soft scrape under bare feet.
He couldn’t see Sam other than as a huge lump in the bed, but he could hear Sam’s breathing, familiar as the scars that crisscrossed his own body. He stayed in the doorway for a few minutes, then padded back to his own room, replayed the sound in his head, and fell asleep.
II.
“Sleep okay?” Sam asked as they sat down to breakfast.
Dean shrugged as he sipped his coffee, dark liquid a warm comfort going down. He figured he’d had five hours, total, which wasn’t bad, considering. “Yeah. You?”
A nod. “I don’t even remember falling asleep, man. My head hit the pillow, and then I woke up when the birds went nuts outside.”
Dean couldn’t help the spark of jealousy, but he stamped it out and focused on his food, shoveling in a huge forkful of fluffy scrambled eggs. After he finished chewing, he asked, “Want to walk around after breakfast? Get the lay of the land?”
“Sure. Should we clean up first?”
Dean nodded and called first shower.
---
It only took a few minutes before Dean wished he’d let Sam go first. The water temperature refused to stay put, going back and forth from scalding to freezing like a boat rocking on rough seas, posing way too much of a threat to Dean Junior for Dean’s liking.
He spit out a stream of obscenities throughout the shower and, when he finished, nearly concussed himself on the medicine cabinet as he lunged out and grabbed a towel.
He’d just finished drying his traumatized skin when he heard Sam’s yell.
“Dean!”
Urgent, and from outside, although not close enough to be on the porch.
No sign of Sam through the bathroom window, so Dean hustled to the sliding door and looked out, spotted Sam by the small pond about twenty yards downhill.
No, not by the pond. In the pond. Or rather, in the muddy patch at the edge, right up to his knees.
What the hell?
Dean pulled on clothes and boots, then yanked the sliding door open and stepped onto the porch. He waved a hand toward Sam. “Dude! What -- ”
“Just get over here!” Sam grated out, head swiveling between their neighbors’ condos like some lame dance move, probably checking for onlookers.
Dean saw none as he made his way toward Sam, who lowered his head and fixed his eyes on the ground just before Dean reached him.
“I’m stuck,” Sam muttered.
Dean snorted. Then laughed. “Seriously?”
Gritted teeth, and still no eye contact. “Yes. Seriously. This mud’s like quicksand.”
Since Sam was stuck, not sinking, Dean decided to satisfy his own curiosity before taking heroic measures. “How the hell did this happen, anyway?”
Sam’s eyes met Dean’s, then slid away, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “There was a rabbit, by that tree,” he said, head tilting to the side. “I wanted to get a better look, and I wasn’t … ” A heavy sigh, like someone had done a slow-mo Heimlich on him. “I didn’t look where I was going.”
“Dude.” Shaking his head, Dean gestured at the mud. “You picked a bad place to go all Dr. Doolittle.”
Sam looked at Dean, pursed his lips. “Just shut up and get me out.”
A quick smirk, and Dean reached out and waited for Sam to grab his hands, then pulled.
Nothing happened.
He pulled again, harder, but still nothing happened.
“Holy crap,” Dean muttered, muscles straining as he yanked a third time. The mud’s hold was so strong he might as well be trying to move a horse.
Three more bone-grinding heaves, though, and Sam came loose with a squelch, the momentum carrying him into Dean and knocking Dean to the ground.
“Off,” Dean panted, Sam’s weight and Greer’s high altitude sucking the air from his lungs like a reverse bellows.
Sam pushed himself up, and then his eyebrows merged into one long, hairy line as he looked down. His expression crumpled. “My shoe,” he moaned.
Dean checked, and sure enough, Sam had lost a shoe. The right one wasn’t on his foot, or resting near or atop the muddy spot he’d been stuck in. Which meant it was somewhere in all that muck.
Terrific.
Getting to his feet, breathing near normal again, Dean pressed his lips together. “This is becoming, like, a thing with you, isn’t it?”
Sam ignored the question, instead staring at the pond like it was trying to destroy every good thing in his life. “Dammit. I don’t have any other shoes to wear.” He sighed, then raised his eyebrows at Dean. “Would you … ”
“Would I what?”
“You know … get my shoe?”
A simple request, and Dean had a simple answer. “Hell, no.”
“Dean -- ”
“You do it. You’re already muddy.”
“Please?”
No. No way. That word, that look, wasn’t gonna work this time.
“I’m not digging around in that mud,” Dean said, grimacing. “Stuff looks nasty. Did you see the worms wriggling around in there? And the ants running across the top? Suckers were the size of mice.” He shuddered. “Who knows what else is in there. I might catch some crazy-ass disease.”
Sam’s head cocked to the side. “Dude. You’ve touched worse things.”
“So have you.”
“C’mon, man.” Sam’s tone was somewhere between a plea and a whine. He gestured toward his mud-soaked jeans. “I need to clean up.”
“Not right now, you don’t. You just know this -- ” Dean waved toward the pond “ -- is gonna be gross, and you’re too much of a wimp to do it yourself.”
“And you’re too much of a wimp to do it for me,” Sam shot back.
“No, I’m too smart to do it for you.” An eyebrow arched. “And I notice you didn’t deny being a wimp.”
Sam blew a slow breath through his nose like some kind of long-suffering saint, glanced at the pond, and sighed. “If you get it, I’ll do laundry for the next two weeks.”
Dean could totally get on board with that idea, given the usual crusty, smelly state of their laundry. Although … two weeks seemed a little cheap. “Six weeks.”
“Four. And that’s my final offer.”
“Done.” Dean jabbed a finger at the pond. “But I’m not fishing around in that crap with my bare hands.” He looked up at the porch, gaze traveling sideways until he found what he wanted. “Hang on.”
Up the hill and to the porch, then the grill, then back to the pond.
Squatting into a crouch just outside the mud’s edge, Dean used the grill brush he’d snagged and started probing for Sam’s shoe, shoving aside mud thick as oatmeal but uncovering nothing except twigs and rocks.
Sam shifted beside Dean, thick brown muck dropping from his jeans in clumps. “Looks like it might take awhile, huh?”
Dean grunted.
“I’ll just go inside, clean up,” he said, and headed toward the condo, footsteps a series of uneven squelching sounds.
Resisting the urge to flick mud at Sam’s back, Dean shoved the grill brush as deep as possible without overbalancing. It took two minutes of scraping and pushing and pulling, of dislodging all sizes of worms and ants along the way, and then he hit shoe, exposed the laces across the top.
Dean grinned. “Oh yeah. I’m the man.”
But when he hooked the grill brush’s handle into the laces, it didn’t provide enough leverage for him to pull the shoe out.
Freakin’ Sammy and his big-ass feet.
Grimacing, Dean reached into the muck, cool mud squishing through fingers, and pulled the shoe out, grunting with the effort. The force was enough that mud flicked off his prize and across his face, into his hair, and onto the teeth he’d bared.
Dean spit out the mud as fast as he could but still managed to taste it, cold, wet grit and something disturbingly unidentifiable mingling together to make him gag twice.
He couldn’t brush his teeth fast enough.
III.
It took awhile to clean up. Getting the mud off themselves and Sam’s jeans wasn’t too bad, but removing it from Sam’s shoes, particularly the shoelaces, was another thing. Especially since Sam insisted on scrubbing the shoes in three bowls of soapy water before deeming them acceptable. Oh, and then he had to spray them with Lysol. And run them under a blow dryer. And spray them with more Lysol.
Freak.
The whole process took so long Dean wondered if maybe they should’ve left the shoe in the mud and let Sam go barefoot until they bought new ones.
When Sam finally finished up it was lunchtime, so they set to work in the kitchen. Sam put together a salad that had so many ingredients Dean lost track of them, while Dean made a pasta sauce that involved simmering sautéed onions, carrots, and celery with chopped tomatoes, butter, and salt. As it cooked, he made garlic toast and put water on to boil for the spaghetti, nose wrinkling as dried food left on the burner smoldered.
Thirty minutes later they sat down to eat, and it tasted freakin’ awesome. Even the salad was good, Dean grudgingly admitted to himself.
As they sprawled in their chairs after stuffing themselves, Sam cocked his head to the side, expression thoughtful. “When was the last time we made a lunch like this?”
Dean tried to place it. When it came to lunch, they usually opted for fast food or diners, or made a quick sandwich. “I think … It was last year, after we took care of the water babies. The Holsteads let us stay at their house because of your cracked ribs.”
Sam’s expression cleared, a light bulb flicking on. “Oh, yeah. And we made lunch to say thanks.”
“Yup. I made steak and baked potatoes, and you made salad.” Dean thought about the salad they’d just eaten and arched an eyebrow. “Dude, you need to expand your culinary repertoire.”
Sam snorted. “My culinary repertoire’s fine.”
“Yeah, if you consider salad, grilled cheese sandwiches, and mac and cheese a repertoire.”
“Hey, I make more than that.” Sam started ticking things off on his fingers, long digits full of indignation. “BLTs, cheeseburgers, bean burritos -- ”
“I’m talking about making something that requires actual effort, not just boiling water or slapping together two or three ingredients.” Dean hooked a thumb at the small pot on the stove. “Something like my kickass tomato sauce.”
Sam rolled his eyes so hard Dean thought they might launch themselves right out of his head. “I made chicken noodle soup from scratch when you had pneumonia my senior year in high school. Remember?”
Dean flipped through his mental filing cabinet. “Nope.”
“Yeah, well … you were feverish when you ate it.”
A shrug. “So you say. For all I know, you fed me Campbell’s chicken noodle straight out of the can.”
“I did not.”
“Prove it.”
Sam scowled, then sighed. “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”
Lacing his fingers together behind his head, Dean grinned. “It’s part of my charm.”
Sam snorted, shook his head, and started clearing the table.
---
“I wish we had fishing poles,” Sam said as they stopped at the river’s edge.
Across the water, twelve feet away and to the left, a family of three stood gearing up to fish, checking poles and lines. Dean pegged the parents, decked out in matching khaki clothes and hats, as yuppies in their early forties. The purple-haired girl, wearing raggedy jeans and a Linkin Park T-shirt, looked to be in her middle teens. She slouched, head cocked to the side like she was working on slipping into a coma.
“Okay,” Mr. Yuppie said. “I’ll practice casting before I add the bait.”
Dragging his gaze away from the family, Dean eyed Sam and saw wistfulness there, more vague than sharp. Thank God Sammy wasn’t seriously jonesing for fishing poles, because they had none, and it’d be a waste of money to buy them for one day, then ditch them when they left. They didn’t have room for them in the Impala’s trunk. That was reserved for weapons, and it wasn’t like they’d need to reel in possessed, killer fish anytime soon.
Then again --
“You know,” Sam said, “I haven’t been fishing in years. Not since before I left for college.”
College. Stanford. Not Dean’s favorite time period, but he could talk about, if he had to. “Me, either.”
An eyebrow lifted, a question mark. “You and Dad never … ”
Dean’s response held no heat or regret. “We were kind of busy with the whole saving people, hunting things deal. Besides, Dad’s only liked fishing when it could be used as a training exercise.”
Sam studied Dean for a long, pensive moment, then nodded. One heartbeat later, he gasped, grabbed his right ear, and dropped the f-bomb, the word loud in the peaceful setting, an obscenity yelled in a church.
Adrenaline flooded Dean’s system as he moved in front of Sam. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
Wincing, Sam lowered bloody fingers and revealed a fishing hook in his earlobe, right smack in the middle.
“Oh my God!” came a man’s voice from across the river.
Over his shoulder, Dean saw Mr. Yuppie looking mortified, fishing rod in hand, the line leading from him to Sam’s ear. Mrs. Yuppie seemed equally horrified. Her mouth hung open far enough to park a car in it.
The girl, though, looked less troubled. She merely whistled, then added, “Nice casting, Dad.”
“Nobody move!” Dean barked, and then to Sam, softer, “Hold still.”
“No problem,” Sam hissed through teeth gritted like the world’s best dam.
Careful movements as if defusing a bomb -- and Dean had done that a few times too many -- and Dean removed the hook, tossed it in the water. Tilting his head to the side, he examined the neat hole in Sam’s ear, keeping his movements gentle. What he saw eased his anxiety a few notches.
“Dude,” he said, “you’re lucky. Went straight through instead of ripping down. It’s barely even bleeding. That jackass could maybe pierce ears for a living.”
“Terrific,” Sam muttered, wincing as he covered the hole with thumb and forefinger. Blood oozed with the pressure like toothpaste from a tube.
“I’m so sorry!” Mr. Yuppie babbled as he approached, feet crunching over river rock. His pole, Dean saw, rested on the opposite side of the river. “Are you all right?”
“He’s fine,” Dean bit out. He was trying really hard not to lose his temper, because Mr. Yuppie was your garden-variety idiot, not some supernatural badass out to draw blood.
Mrs. Yuppie jogged over next, then kneeled and flipped open a huge, well-stocked first-aid kit that had Dean wondering if this wasn’t the first time her husband had hooked someone.
“Here,” she said, standing up with hydrogen peroxide and cotton pads in her perfectly manicured hands. “Let me … ”
Sam took a step back, features polite but firm. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. “Thanks, but we can take care of it ourselves.”
“Please.” Her blue eyes widened as she bit her lip and looked from her sheepish husband back to Sam. “It’s the least we can do.”
A small sigh, and Sam nodded, moved toward her.
As Dean stepped aside to give them some room, the girl approached him. She looked amused, like this was the high point of her trip.
“My dad’s fishing skills leave a lot to be desired.” She jerked a thumb toward Sam. “He’s not the first victim.”
Dean snorted. “Kind of figured that.”
Mr. Yuppie scrubbed a hand over his pale face as if this was all too much for him, then mumbled another apology and headed back to his gear.
To Dean’s surprise, the girl’s amusement dimmed, and she followed her dad, patted his back as they walked.
Huh. She liked the old man after all.
Mrs. Yuppie’s voice drew Dean’s attention back to Sam, whose bloody ear and hand were now clean.
“I don’t think it even needs a Band-Aid,” she said, putting away her first-aid supplies. “And just so you know, Frank’s fishing pole is new, and the hook, too. I doubt there was anything on it that could cause an infection.”
“Thanks,” Sam murmured, even as Dean added Check Sam’s ear every few hours to his to-do list. With Sam, the most harmless injury could go south.
Mrs. Yuppie snapped the first-aid kit shut and gave them an apologetic smile. “I hope you enjoy the rest of your trip.”
Sam nodded and offered his own smile. “You, too.”
As she went to catch up to her family, Dean waved at Sam’s injured ear. “How’s it feel?”
“Okay.”
Which meant it hurt, but not too badly. Dean nodded, then studied Sam, and his lips twitched. “Hey. I was thinking maybe we should find a jewelry store on our way out of town. Fix you up with something sparkly for that ear.”
Sam’s resulting frown turned upside down way too fast. “Well, you’d certainly be the best judge of what earrings a guy should wear, since you had one in high school.”
Dammit. “We don’t talk about that, Sammy. Ever. You know that.”
Sam snickered, licked his index finger, and drew a point in the air.
IV.
Since Sam didn’t need a Band-Aid and his ear had stopped bleeding, they finished exploring the terrain before returning to the condo.
And found the sliding door pulled back about a foot.
“Did we forget to close it?” Sam asked as they stopped side by side on the porch, ants bolting out of their path.
Tensing up like a jack-in the-box ready to spring at whatever might be waiting for them, Dean thought back on when they’d left an hour ago, and … “Crap.”
“Crap?” Wary and impatient, and Sam’s right hand hovered near the gun tucked into the back of his waistband. “Define ‘crap.’”
“I uh … I went inside to make sure the front door was locked, and then I came outside, but before I could close the sliding door, you got all giddy about those squirrels, and … ”
“And you forgot to close the door.” Sam’s sigh was heavy with exasperation. “We should be careful going in, in case someone decided the open door was an invite.”
“Yeah.” Dean shoved the door open wider with his left hand, right hand grazing but not drawing his .45. He knew Sam was showing the same restraint, because if they pulled their weapons and someone saw them … They needed that kind of attention like Dean needed Viagra.
Two steady, slow steps inside, Dean first and Sam behind him, dominos in a line, and then they stopped. Stared.
A bristly, obsidian-eyed raccoon crouched on the floor in front of Dean, a large bag of peanut M&Ms in its mouth.
“What the -- ” Sam started, and the raccoon raced past them and onto the porch.
“Sonofabitch!” Dean spat, because dammit, that was his only bag of M&Ms, and a man shouldn’t be deprived of his candy. Especially when he was on vacation.
Shoving aside Sam the Human Wall, Dean gave chase, boots scraping over the porch and then hitting soft earth, pine smell tickling his nose as the slight breeze grazed him. The thuds somewhere behind him were probably Sam, but he wasn’t about to spare a look to confirm it. Couldn’t derail his attention from his prey.
The raccoon had a lead, but not a huge one, and Dean’s eyes narrowed. “Come here, you little bastard!”
It didn’t, of course, so Dean kept running, pounding over grass and rocks, down, down, down to the river, where the raccoon stopped, eyed him, and shook its head, hard. The M&Ms sailed into the water, and the current carried the bag downstream like a mother hustling its child out of harm’s way.
“Sonofabitch!” Dean seethed as he halted, forward momentum pulling him off balance for a second.
The raccoon lifted its nose at him, sneezed, and scampered up a nearby tree.
Scanning the river, Dean weighed his options. He loved M&Ms. Had loved them since Mom gave him his first bag on his third birthday, or so Dad had claimed. But the bag was out of reach, would require him to get seriously wet, and he wasn’t in the mood for that. Besides, he had Twizzlers in the kitchen. They’d do.
But dammit, they weren’t M&Ms.
Turning to the tree, Dean scowled up at the raccoon. It rested on a high branch like a furry snake, clawed feet and ringed tail wrapping around the bark.
Dean slammed a hand against the tree, shaking it. “Thanks a lot, you little bastard!”
The raccoon scurried to a higher branch.
“Dean.”
Sam’s voice behind him, and Dean turned, found Sam giving him the “Would you please shut up?!” look. Sam’s head tilted backward and to the side, and Dean followed the cue, saw a heavyset man with wire-rimmed glasses and a pigtailed little girl standing a few feet away. The girl’s brown eyes were huge, worried, and the man -- must be her dad -- had his hands on her shoulders, like he was comforting her. He was looking at Dean like Dean had beaten the raccoon to a pulp and then eaten it for dinner.
“C’mon, honey,” the man said and, after shaking his head, guided the girl away.
“Dude,” Sam chided. “They’re just M&Ms.”
Dean felt the pout on his lips, heard it in his voice, but couldn’t help himself. “Yeah. But they were my M&Ms.”
Sam clapped him on the shoulder. “I know, Dean. I know. C’mon, man. Let’s head back.”
---
The rest of the afternoon was, mercifully, less exciting. Sam kicked back on the porch with his laptop and geeked out on the Internet while Dean immersed himself in an all-day marathon of The Next Food Network Star. And holy crap, the contestants couldn’t cook to save their lives, looked like jackasses in front of the camera.
If Dean wasn’t so busy saving the world, he’d show them how it was done. Get his own series, and call it --
A knock at the door, short and sharp, and Dean went to answer it, although not before shooting a scornful glance at the skinny blonde who’d never cooked fish before. That chick shouldn’t be allowed in a kitchen.
The woman standing on the doorstep wore a green T-shirt with a Greer’s Premier Lodge & Resort logo in swirly black print across the front. Her makeup was minimal, her dark hair tucked behind her ears. Professional, but not overly concerned with her looks. Probably an Important Person at the lodge, given her businesslike expression.
“Hello, Mr. Hetfield,” she said coolly, gaze flicking around the room and then back, a cop surveying a crime scene. “Is your brother here, too?”
Dean didn’t like how official this sounded. He flirted with the idea of trying to charm her, get on her good side, but her posture told him it would be a waste of time. “Why do you need him?”
Footsteps behind him, and then Sam was there, voice polite as he asked, “Can we help you?”
“I hope so.” No smile at all as she continued. “I’m Gina, the manager, and I’ve received a few complaints about you from some of the guests.”
“Complaints?” Dean repeated, tension easing up a fraction, relieved this didn’t seem to be a legal matter. Pissy guests he could deal with.
Gina nodded. “May I come in?”
Dean exchanged a look with Sam -- Better get this over with -- and then waved her inside, shutting the door behind her.
Sam pulled out a chair. “Do you want to sit down?”
“No, thank you.” She eyed them both in turn. “The first complaint was about your language. Apparently you’ve been swearing rather loudly outside.”
Dean suppressed a snort. They couldn’t be the first people to swear outdoors around here.
“Also,” Gina continued, pinning Dean with a stern look, a disapproving teacher chastising a naughty student, “we heard that you terrorized a raccoon this afternoon.”
This time Dean did snort. “Terrorized? That little bas -- ” At Sam’s loud throat clearing, Dean corrected himself. “That little hairball stole my M&Ms. I was trying to get them back.”
“The guest who complained didn’t see any M&Ms.”
The dad. He and his daughter must have shown up after the raccoon had ditched the candy.
Sam stepped forward, a human buffer, and offered an empathetic smile, like he honest-to-God felt Gina’s pain. “The raccoon really did take the M&Ms, but we know that’s not the point. We haven’t been on our best behavior, and we’re really sorry.”
Dean really wasn’t.
Gina, unaffected by the Sam Winchester charm, turned to Dean with lips pursed tight as if they’d been sewn together. “We had one more complaint.”
“Of course you did,” Dean muttered, then glared at Sam when Sam elbowed his arm.
Gina continued. “A few guests said you were walking around naked in the living room with the curtains open, in full view of anyone in the immediate vicinity.”
Sam’s eyebrows arched, and he gave Dean an incredulous look. “Seriously?”
“Uh … ” It only took a moment, and then the memory surfaced, a high-resolution image front and center. He winced. “Yeah. After I got out of the shower, you yelled from outside. I didn’t know what was wrong, and I didn’t put any clothes on before I went to check.”
Gina shook her head, looked highly unimpressed. “From now on, pull the curtains before you take a shower. And tone things down for the rest of your stay.”
“We will,” Sam said, polite as only Sam could be.
Dean merely nodded, lips pressed together so he wouldn’t say anything that’d piss Gina off. He resented having to play nice when he’d done nothing wrong. Hell, he didn’t like playing nice when he had.
Gina studied them for a long moment, like they’d taken a test and she was double-checking their answers, then nodded and left.
After closing the door behind her with a soft click, Dean turned to Sam. “Dude. What the hell’s with the morality police?”
Sam didn’t get the chance to answer, because skittering noises drew their attention toward the sliding door, which Sam had apparently left open. Two raccoons were racing off the porch and toward the trees, a blur of fur.
Sam huffed. “One of them has my shoe!”
“Screw that,” Dean said, eyes narrowing. “The other one took my Twizzlers.”
They nearly knocked each other over in their rush toward the porch.
---
Fifteen minutes later they returned to the condo empty-handed, flopped onto the couch, and stared out the now closed sliding door as they caught their breath.
Sam winced from time to time, fingers going to his ear occasionally, and Dean waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore, didn’t care if Sam called him a mother hen.
“Ear okay?”
Sam nodded. “Yeah. Just stings a little.” As Dean leaned forward to check, Sam ducked his head away. “Dude. It’s not infected. Chill.”
“Ingrate,” Dean muttered, more tired than irked. They went back to staring out the door. “If it falls off overnight, don’t blame me.”
A snort, and then a long sigh. “This isn’t turning out as relaxing as I hoped.”
“Tell me about it.” Dean scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’d totally ask for my money back. Except, you know, we didn’t pay for any of this.”
“Yeah.” Sam’s next words were mournful, a kid who’d dropped his ice cream cone. “I only have one shoe now.”
Dean nodded, and frowned as he waved toward the kitchen. “I don’t have anymore candy.”
A moment passed, heavy sighs filling the room like balloons being slowly emptied of air. Dean took advantage of the quiet to consider the past several hours and ponder what might happen next.
He nudged Sam. “Hey. I have an idea.”
---
An hour later they were in a musty motel room, stretched out on narrow, lumpy beds with scratchy sheets. Highway traffic noise filtered through the cheap, thin windows. Sam’s soft snores rode just above it.
Dean smiled, closed his eyes, and drifted to sleep.
---
End
August 2008
By iamstealthyone
Summary: Sam and Dean set out to enjoy some R&R at a nice little condo in Arizona. It doesn’t go well.
Characters: Sam and Dean.
Rating: PG-13 for some cussing and sexual references. Genfic.
Word count: 5,300
Disclaimer: Don’t own them. Not making money off of them.
Author’s notes: Many thanks to swanseajill for the beta read. She not only made this a better story, but also helped me settle on a title.
I.
“I have to admit, this is pretty awesome,” Dean said as he surveyed the view from their back porch, late-afternoon sun mellow overhead and breeze brushing against his skin.
It wasn’t like he’d never been to a scenic spot like this before. He had, a few dozen times. But those visits had always been for dangerous hunts, or hellish camping trips, or grueling training exercises. Not to sit around and chill out.
This time, though, it was all about the R&R.
Thanks to one of Sam’s friends, they had a free, two-night stay in a 1,000-square-foot condo in Greer, Arizona. The condo sat just off the Little Colorado River, in the middle of pine trees and aspens that gave the air a clean, crisp smell.
As Dean listened to the river rushing by like a muted rainstorm, his entire body relaxing as if he’d stretched out on the world’s most kick-ass mattress, Sam walked up and whistled.
“What a view.” Sam smiled, then hitched a thumb toward the condo. “This place is way better than the crappy motels we usually stay at.”
It was, especially the last one. A dozen dead platypuses had been stuffed and strategically placed around their room. Dean hadn’t been able to decide what was creepier: the two clinging to the ceiling fan or the one mounted on the wall behind the toilet.
“Did you see the beds?” Sam asked, leaning against the porch railing.
Dean nodded. He had. One king, one queen, both with wrought-iron headboards -- which rocked from a hunter’s perspective -- more pillows than anyone could possibly need, and soft sheets that the average person would take for granted.
“And then there’s the … ” Sam’s voice trailed off as his gaze drifted over Dean’s shoulder, and his face lit up like a stripper had just given him a top-of-the-line computer.
Okay, so the stripper was more Dean’s fantasy than Sam’s, but --
“Squirrel!” Sam whispered.
“Huh?”
“Squirrel!” he repeated, pointing.
Sure enough, a squirrel was scurrying across the ground in front of the porch. It stopped and peered up at them, then scampered away in a hyper streak of fur, grass rustling in its wake.
Turning toward Sam, Dean snorted. “Dude. You’d think you’d never seen a squirrel before.”
Sam’s grin faded, a balloon popped, and guilt smacked Dean upside the head. The past year had sucked, hard, and Sammy deserved happiness wherever he could find it.
“It’s kind of cool, I guess,” Dean allowed. “I mean, we don’t see squirrels this close up too often. Or if we do, whatever thing we’re hunting has ripped them in half.”
Okay. So words really weren’t Dean’s thing.
“You’re such an ass,” Sam said, but he was grinning again, fond exasperation, and that was good enough for Dean.
---
“This is weird,” Sam said as they trudged up the stairs to their separate bedrooms. The long drive that afternoon, four games of Battleship, and two burgers apiece, heavy on the cheese, had forced them to call it a night at nine-thirty. “We always sleep in the same room.”
Dean snickered as he followed Sam up, their footsteps finding the occasional weak, creaking spot on the stairs. “Don’t worry, Sammy. If you get too scared in your big-boy bed, you can come cuddle with me.”
Sam stopped, threw a glare at Dean, and resumed his ascent.
---
Two hours later, Dean was scowling at the ceiling, sheets a rumpled mess from tossing and turning as he’d tried, unsuccessfully, to get to sleep.
It totally wasn’t because Sam was in a different room.
---
Forty-eight minutes and two seconds later, Dean crept down the hallway to the next room, carpet a soft scrape under bare feet.
He couldn’t see Sam other than as a huge lump in the bed, but he could hear Sam’s breathing, familiar as the scars that crisscrossed his own body. He stayed in the doorway for a few minutes, then padded back to his own room, replayed the sound in his head, and fell asleep.
II.
“Sleep okay?” Sam asked as they sat down to breakfast.
Dean shrugged as he sipped his coffee, dark liquid a warm comfort going down. He figured he’d had five hours, total, which wasn’t bad, considering. “Yeah. You?”
A nod. “I don’t even remember falling asleep, man. My head hit the pillow, and then I woke up when the birds went nuts outside.”
Dean couldn’t help the spark of jealousy, but he stamped it out and focused on his food, shoveling in a huge forkful of fluffy scrambled eggs. After he finished chewing, he asked, “Want to walk around after breakfast? Get the lay of the land?”
“Sure. Should we clean up first?”
Dean nodded and called first shower.
---
It only took a few minutes before Dean wished he’d let Sam go first. The water temperature refused to stay put, going back and forth from scalding to freezing like a boat rocking on rough seas, posing way too much of a threat to Dean Junior for Dean’s liking.
He spit out a stream of obscenities throughout the shower and, when he finished, nearly concussed himself on the medicine cabinet as he lunged out and grabbed a towel.
He’d just finished drying his traumatized skin when he heard Sam’s yell.
“Dean!”
Urgent, and from outside, although not close enough to be on the porch.
No sign of Sam through the bathroom window, so Dean hustled to the sliding door and looked out, spotted Sam by the small pond about twenty yards downhill.
No, not by the pond. In the pond. Or rather, in the muddy patch at the edge, right up to his knees.
What the hell?
Dean pulled on clothes and boots, then yanked the sliding door open and stepped onto the porch. He waved a hand toward Sam. “Dude! What -- ”
“Just get over here!” Sam grated out, head swiveling between their neighbors’ condos like some lame dance move, probably checking for onlookers.
Dean saw none as he made his way toward Sam, who lowered his head and fixed his eyes on the ground just before Dean reached him.
“I’m stuck,” Sam muttered.
Dean snorted. Then laughed. “Seriously?”
Gritted teeth, and still no eye contact. “Yes. Seriously. This mud’s like quicksand.”
Since Sam was stuck, not sinking, Dean decided to satisfy his own curiosity before taking heroic measures. “How the hell did this happen, anyway?”
Sam’s eyes met Dean’s, then slid away, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “There was a rabbit, by that tree,” he said, head tilting to the side. “I wanted to get a better look, and I wasn’t … ” A heavy sigh, like someone had done a slow-mo Heimlich on him. “I didn’t look where I was going.”
“Dude.” Shaking his head, Dean gestured at the mud. “You picked a bad place to go all Dr. Doolittle.”
Sam looked at Dean, pursed his lips. “Just shut up and get me out.”
A quick smirk, and Dean reached out and waited for Sam to grab his hands, then pulled.
Nothing happened.
He pulled again, harder, but still nothing happened.
“Holy crap,” Dean muttered, muscles straining as he yanked a third time. The mud’s hold was so strong he might as well be trying to move a horse.
Three more bone-grinding heaves, though, and Sam came loose with a squelch, the momentum carrying him into Dean and knocking Dean to the ground.
“Off,” Dean panted, Sam’s weight and Greer’s high altitude sucking the air from his lungs like a reverse bellows.
Sam pushed himself up, and then his eyebrows merged into one long, hairy line as he looked down. His expression crumpled. “My shoe,” he moaned.
Dean checked, and sure enough, Sam had lost a shoe. The right one wasn’t on his foot, or resting near or atop the muddy spot he’d been stuck in. Which meant it was somewhere in all that muck.
Terrific.
Getting to his feet, breathing near normal again, Dean pressed his lips together. “This is becoming, like, a thing with you, isn’t it?”
Sam ignored the question, instead staring at the pond like it was trying to destroy every good thing in his life. “Dammit. I don’t have any other shoes to wear.” He sighed, then raised his eyebrows at Dean. “Would you … ”
“Would I what?”
“You know … get my shoe?”
A simple request, and Dean had a simple answer. “Hell, no.”
“Dean -- ”
“You do it. You’re already muddy.”
“Please?”
No. No way. That word, that look, wasn’t gonna work this time.
“I’m not digging around in that mud,” Dean said, grimacing. “Stuff looks nasty. Did you see the worms wriggling around in there? And the ants running across the top? Suckers were the size of mice.” He shuddered. “Who knows what else is in there. I might catch some crazy-ass disease.”
Sam’s head cocked to the side. “Dude. You’ve touched worse things.”
“So have you.”
“C’mon, man.” Sam’s tone was somewhere between a plea and a whine. He gestured toward his mud-soaked jeans. “I need to clean up.”
“Not right now, you don’t. You just know this -- ” Dean waved toward the pond “ -- is gonna be gross, and you’re too much of a wimp to do it yourself.”
“And you’re too much of a wimp to do it for me,” Sam shot back.
“No, I’m too smart to do it for you.” An eyebrow arched. “And I notice you didn’t deny being a wimp.”
Sam blew a slow breath through his nose like some kind of long-suffering saint, glanced at the pond, and sighed. “If you get it, I’ll do laundry for the next two weeks.”
Dean could totally get on board with that idea, given the usual crusty, smelly state of their laundry. Although … two weeks seemed a little cheap. “Six weeks.”
“Four. And that’s my final offer.”
“Done.” Dean jabbed a finger at the pond. “But I’m not fishing around in that crap with my bare hands.” He looked up at the porch, gaze traveling sideways until he found what he wanted. “Hang on.”
Up the hill and to the porch, then the grill, then back to the pond.
Squatting into a crouch just outside the mud’s edge, Dean used the grill brush he’d snagged and started probing for Sam’s shoe, shoving aside mud thick as oatmeal but uncovering nothing except twigs and rocks.
Sam shifted beside Dean, thick brown muck dropping from his jeans in clumps. “Looks like it might take awhile, huh?”
Dean grunted.
“I’ll just go inside, clean up,” he said, and headed toward the condo, footsteps a series of uneven squelching sounds.
Resisting the urge to flick mud at Sam’s back, Dean shoved the grill brush as deep as possible without overbalancing. It took two minutes of scraping and pushing and pulling, of dislodging all sizes of worms and ants along the way, and then he hit shoe, exposed the laces across the top.
Dean grinned. “Oh yeah. I’m the man.”
But when he hooked the grill brush’s handle into the laces, it didn’t provide enough leverage for him to pull the shoe out.
Freakin’ Sammy and his big-ass feet.
Grimacing, Dean reached into the muck, cool mud squishing through fingers, and pulled the shoe out, grunting with the effort. The force was enough that mud flicked off his prize and across his face, into his hair, and onto the teeth he’d bared.
Dean spit out the mud as fast as he could but still managed to taste it, cold, wet grit and something disturbingly unidentifiable mingling together to make him gag twice.
He couldn’t brush his teeth fast enough.
III.
It took awhile to clean up. Getting the mud off themselves and Sam’s jeans wasn’t too bad, but removing it from Sam’s shoes, particularly the shoelaces, was another thing. Especially since Sam insisted on scrubbing the shoes in three bowls of soapy water before deeming them acceptable. Oh, and then he had to spray them with Lysol. And run them under a blow dryer. And spray them with more Lysol.
Freak.
The whole process took so long Dean wondered if maybe they should’ve left the shoe in the mud and let Sam go barefoot until they bought new ones.
When Sam finally finished up it was lunchtime, so they set to work in the kitchen. Sam put together a salad that had so many ingredients Dean lost track of them, while Dean made a pasta sauce that involved simmering sautéed onions, carrots, and celery with chopped tomatoes, butter, and salt. As it cooked, he made garlic toast and put water on to boil for the spaghetti, nose wrinkling as dried food left on the burner smoldered.
Thirty minutes later they sat down to eat, and it tasted freakin’ awesome. Even the salad was good, Dean grudgingly admitted to himself.
As they sprawled in their chairs after stuffing themselves, Sam cocked his head to the side, expression thoughtful. “When was the last time we made a lunch like this?”
Dean tried to place it. When it came to lunch, they usually opted for fast food or diners, or made a quick sandwich. “I think … It was last year, after we took care of the water babies. The Holsteads let us stay at their house because of your cracked ribs.”
Sam’s expression cleared, a light bulb flicking on. “Oh, yeah. And we made lunch to say thanks.”
“Yup. I made steak and baked potatoes, and you made salad.” Dean thought about the salad they’d just eaten and arched an eyebrow. “Dude, you need to expand your culinary repertoire.”
Sam snorted. “My culinary repertoire’s fine.”
“Yeah, if you consider salad, grilled cheese sandwiches, and mac and cheese a repertoire.”
“Hey, I make more than that.” Sam started ticking things off on his fingers, long digits full of indignation. “BLTs, cheeseburgers, bean burritos -- ”
“I’m talking about making something that requires actual effort, not just boiling water or slapping together two or three ingredients.” Dean hooked a thumb at the small pot on the stove. “Something like my kickass tomato sauce.”
Sam rolled his eyes so hard Dean thought they might launch themselves right out of his head. “I made chicken noodle soup from scratch when you had pneumonia my senior year in high school. Remember?”
Dean flipped through his mental filing cabinet. “Nope.”
“Yeah, well … you were feverish when you ate it.”
A shrug. “So you say. For all I know, you fed me Campbell’s chicken noodle straight out of the can.”
“I did not.”
“Prove it.”
Sam scowled, then sighed. “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”
Lacing his fingers together behind his head, Dean grinned. “It’s part of my charm.”
Sam snorted, shook his head, and started clearing the table.
---
“I wish we had fishing poles,” Sam said as they stopped at the river’s edge.
Across the water, twelve feet away and to the left, a family of three stood gearing up to fish, checking poles and lines. Dean pegged the parents, decked out in matching khaki clothes and hats, as yuppies in their early forties. The purple-haired girl, wearing raggedy jeans and a Linkin Park T-shirt, looked to be in her middle teens. She slouched, head cocked to the side like she was working on slipping into a coma.
“Okay,” Mr. Yuppie said. “I’ll practice casting before I add the bait.”
Dragging his gaze away from the family, Dean eyed Sam and saw wistfulness there, more vague than sharp. Thank God Sammy wasn’t seriously jonesing for fishing poles, because they had none, and it’d be a waste of money to buy them for one day, then ditch them when they left. They didn’t have room for them in the Impala’s trunk. That was reserved for weapons, and it wasn’t like they’d need to reel in possessed, killer fish anytime soon.
Then again --
“You know,” Sam said, “I haven’t been fishing in years. Not since before I left for college.”
College. Stanford. Not Dean’s favorite time period, but he could talk about, if he had to. “Me, either.”
An eyebrow lifted, a question mark. “You and Dad never … ”
Dean’s response held no heat or regret. “We were kind of busy with the whole saving people, hunting things deal. Besides, Dad’s only liked fishing when it could be used as a training exercise.”
Sam studied Dean for a long, pensive moment, then nodded. One heartbeat later, he gasped, grabbed his right ear, and dropped the f-bomb, the word loud in the peaceful setting, an obscenity yelled in a church.
Adrenaline flooded Dean’s system as he moved in front of Sam. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
Wincing, Sam lowered bloody fingers and revealed a fishing hook in his earlobe, right smack in the middle.
“Oh my God!” came a man’s voice from across the river.
Over his shoulder, Dean saw Mr. Yuppie looking mortified, fishing rod in hand, the line leading from him to Sam’s ear. Mrs. Yuppie seemed equally horrified. Her mouth hung open far enough to park a car in it.
The girl, though, looked less troubled. She merely whistled, then added, “Nice casting, Dad.”
“Nobody move!” Dean barked, and then to Sam, softer, “Hold still.”
“No problem,” Sam hissed through teeth gritted like the world’s best dam.
Careful movements as if defusing a bomb -- and Dean had done that a few times too many -- and Dean removed the hook, tossed it in the water. Tilting his head to the side, he examined the neat hole in Sam’s ear, keeping his movements gentle. What he saw eased his anxiety a few notches.
“Dude,” he said, “you’re lucky. Went straight through instead of ripping down. It’s barely even bleeding. That jackass could maybe pierce ears for a living.”
“Terrific,” Sam muttered, wincing as he covered the hole with thumb and forefinger. Blood oozed with the pressure like toothpaste from a tube.
“I’m so sorry!” Mr. Yuppie babbled as he approached, feet crunching over river rock. His pole, Dean saw, rested on the opposite side of the river. “Are you all right?”
“He’s fine,” Dean bit out. He was trying really hard not to lose his temper, because Mr. Yuppie was your garden-variety idiot, not some supernatural badass out to draw blood.
Mrs. Yuppie jogged over next, then kneeled and flipped open a huge, well-stocked first-aid kit that had Dean wondering if this wasn’t the first time her husband had hooked someone.
“Here,” she said, standing up with hydrogen peroxide and cotton pads in her perfectly manicured hands. “Let me … ”
Sam took a step back, features polite but firm. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. “Thanks, but we can take care of it ourselves.”
“Please.” Her blue eyes widened as she bit her lip and looked from her sheepish husband back to Sam. “It’s the least we can do.”
A small sigh, and Sam nodded, moved toward her.
As Dean stepped aside to give them some room, the girl approached him. She looked amused, like this was the high point of her trip.
“My dad’s fishing skills leave a lot to be desired.” She jerked a thumb toward Sam. “He’s not the first victim.”
Dean snorted. “Kind of figured that.”
Mr. Yuppie scrubbed a hand over his pale face as if this was all too much for him, then mumbled another apology and headed back to his gear.
To Dean’s surprise, the girl’s amusement dimmed, and she followed her dad, patted his back as they walked.
Huh. She liked the old man after all.
Mrs. Yuppie’s voice drew Dean’s attention back to Sam, whose bloody ear and hand were now clean.
“I don’t think it even needs a Band-Aid,” she said, putting away her first-aid supplies. “And just so you know, Frank’s fishing pole is new, and the hook, too. I doubt there was anything on it that could cause an infection.”
“Thanks,” Sam murmured, even as Dean added Check Sam’s ear every few hours to his to-do list. With Sam, the most harmless injury could go south.
Mrs. Yuppie snapped the first-aid kit shut and gave them an apologetic smile. “I hope you enjoy the rest of your trip.”
Sam nodded and offered his own smile. “You, too.”
As she went to catch up to her family, Dean waved at Sam’s injured ear. “How’s it feel?”
“Okay.”
Which meant it hurt, but not too badly. Dean nodded, then studied Sam, and his lips twitched. “Hey. I was thinking maybe we should find a jewelry store on our way out of town. Fix you up with something sparkly for that ear.”
Sam’s resulting frown turned upside down way too fast. “Well, you’d certainly be the best judge of what earrings a guy should wear, since you had one in high school.”
Dammit. “We don’t talk about that, Sammy. Ever. You know that.”
Sam snickered, licked his index finger, and drew a point in the air.
IV.
Since Sam didn’t need a Band-Aid and his ear had stopped bleeding, they finished exploring the terrain before returning to the condo.
And found the sliding door pulled back about a foot.
“Did we forget to close it?” Sam asked as they stopped side by side on the porch, ants bolting out of their path.
Tensing up like a jack-in the-box ready to spring at whatever might be waiting for them, Dean thought back on when they’d left an hour ago, and … “Crap.”
“Crap?” Wary and impatient, and Sam’s right hand hovered near the gun tucked into the back of his waistband. “Define ‘crap.’”
“I uh … I went inside to make sure the front door was locked, and then I came outside, but before I could close the sliding door, you got all giddy about those squirrels, and … ”
“And you forgot to close the door.” Sam’s sigh was heavy with exasperation. “We should be careful going in, in case someone decided the open door was an invite.”
“Yeah.” Dean shoved the door open wider with his left hand, right hand grazing but not drawing his .45. He knew Sam was showing the same restraint, because if they pulled their weapons and someone saw them … They needed that kind of attention like Dean needed Viagra.
Two steady, slow steps inside, Dean first and Sam behind him, dominos in a line, and then they stopped. Stared.
A bristly, obsidian-eyed raccoon crouched on the floor in front of Dean, a large bag of peanut M&Ms in its mouth.
“What the -- ” Sam started, and the raccoon raced past them and onto the porch.
“Sonofabitch!” Dean spat, because dammit, that was his only bag of M&Ms, and a man shouldn’t be deprived of his candy. Especially when he was on vacation.
Shoving aside Sam the Human Wall, Dean gave chase, boots scraping over the porch and then hitting soft earth, pine smell tickling his nose as the slight breeze grazed him. The thuds somewhere behind him were probably Sam, but he wasn’t about to spare a look to confirm it. Couldn’t derail his attention from his prey.
The raccoon had a lead, but not a huge one, and Dean’s eyes narrowed. “Come here, you little bastard!”
It didn’t, of course, so Dean kept running, pounding over grass and rocks, down, down, down to the river, where the raccoon stopped, eyed him, and shook its head, hard. The M&Ms sailed into the water, and the current carried the bag downstream like a mother hustling its child out of harm’s way.
“Sonofabitch!” Dean seethed as he halted, forward momentum pulling him off balance for a second.
The raccoon lifted its nose at him, sneezed, and scampered up a nearby tree.
Scanning the river, Dean weighed his options. He loved M&Ms. Had loved them since Mom gave him his first bag on his third birthday, or so Dad had claimed. But the bag was out of reach, would require him to get seriously wet, and he wasn’t in the mood for that. Besides, he had Twizzlers in the kitchen. They’d do.
But dammit, they weren’t M&Ms.
Turning to the tree, Dean scowled up at the raccoon. It rested on a high branch like a furry snake, clawed feet and ringed tail wrapping around the bark.
Dean slammed a hand against the tree, shaking it. “Thanks a lot, you little bastard!”
The raccoon scurried to a higher branch.
“Dean.”
Sam’s voice behind him, and Dean turned, found Sam giving him the “Would you please shut up?!” look. Sam’s head tilted backward and to the side, and Dean followed the cue, saw a heavyset man with wire-rimmed glasses and a pigtailed little girl standing a few feet away. The girl’s brown eyes were huge, worried, and the man -- must be her dad -- had his hands on her shoulders, like he was comforting her. He was looking at Dean like Dean had beaten the raccoon to a pulp and then eaten it for dinner.
“C’mon, honey,” the man said and, after shaking his head, guided the girl away.
“Dude,” Sam chided. “They’re just M&Ms.”
Dean felt the pout on his lips, heard it in his voice, but couldn’t help himself. “Yeah. But they were my M&Ms.”
Sam clapped him on the shoulder. “I know, Dean. I know. C’mon, man. Let’s head back.”
---
The rest of the afternoon was, mercifully, less exciting. Sam kicked back on the porch with his laptop and geeked out on the Internet while Dean immersed himself in an all-day marathon of The Next Food Network Star. And holy crap, the contestants couldn’t cook to save their lives, looked like jackasses in front of the camera.
If Dean wasn’t so busy saving the world, he’d show them how it was done. Get his own series, and call it --
A knock at the door, short and sharp, and Dean went to answer it, although not before shooting a scornful glance at the skinny blonde who’d never cooked fish before. That chick shouldn’t be allowed in a kitchen.
The woman standing on the doorstep wore a green T-shirt with a Greer’s Premier Lodge & Resort logo in swirly black print across the front. Her makeup was minimal, her dark hair tucked behind her ears. Professional, but not overly concerned with her looks. Probably an Important Person at the lodge, given her businesslike expression.
“Hello, Mr. Hetfield,” she said coolly, gaze flicking around the room and then back, a cop surveying a crime scene. “Is your brother here, too?”
Dean didn’t like how official this sounded. He flirted with the idea of trying to charm her, get on her good side, but her posture told him it would be a waste of time. “Why do you need him?”
Footsteps behind him, and then Sam was there, voice polite as he asked, “Can we help you?”
“I hope so.” No smile at all as she continued. “I’m Gina, the manager, and I’ve received a few complaints about you from some of the guests.”
“Complaints?” Dean repeated, tension easing up a fraction, relieved this didn’t seem to be a legal matter. Pissy guests he could deal with.
Gina nodded. “May I come in?”
Dean exchanged a look with Sam -- Better get this over with -- and then waved her inside, shutting the door behind her.
Sam pulled out a chair. “Do you want to sit down?”
“No, thank you.” She eyed them both in turn. “The first complaint was about your language. Apparently you’ve been swearing rather loudly outside.”
Dean suppressed a snort. They couldn’t be the first people to swear outdoors around here.
“Also,” Gina continued, pinning Dean with a stern look, a disapproving teacher chastising a naughty student, “we heard that you terrorized a raccoon this afternoon.”
This time Dean did snort. “Terrorized? That little bas -- ” At Sam’s loud throat clearing, Dean corrected himself. “That little hairball stole my M&Ms. I was trying to get them back.”
“The guest who complained didn’t see any M&Ms.”
The dad. He and his daughter must have shown up after the raccoon had ditched the candy.
Sam stepped forward, a human buffer, and offered an empathetic smile, like he honest-to-God felt Gina’s pain. “The raccoon really did take the M&Ms, but we know that’s not the point. We haven’t been on our best behavior, and we’re really sorry.”
Dean really wasn’t.
Gina, unaffected by the Sam Winchester charm, turned to Dean with lips pursed tight as if they’d been sewn together. “We had one more complaint.”
“Of course you did,” Dean muttered, then glared at Sam when Sam elbowed his arm.
Gina continued. “A few guests said you were walking around naked in the living room with the curtains open, in full view of anyone in the immediate vicinity.”
Sam’s eyebrows arched, and he gave Dean an incredulous look. “Seriously?”
“Uh … ” It only took a moment, and then the memory surfaced, a high-resolution image front and center. He winced. “Yeah. After I got out of the shower, you yelled from outside. I didn’t know what was wrong, and I didn’t put any clothes on before I went to check.”
Gina shook her head, looked highly unimpressed. “From now on, pull the curtains before you take a shower. And tone things down for the rest of your stay.”
“We will,” Sam said, polite as only Sam could be.
Dean merely nodded, lips pressed together so he wouldn’t say anything that’d piss Gina off. He resented having to play nice when he’d done nothing wrong. Hell, he didn’t like playing nice when he had.
Gina studied them for a long moment, like they’d taken a test and she was double-checking their answers, then nodded and left.
After closing the door behind her with a soft click, Dean turned to Sam. “Dude. What the hell’s with the morality police?”
Sam didn’t get the chance to answer, because skittering noises drew their attention toward the sliding door, which Sam had apparently left open. Two raccoons were racing off the porch and toward the trees, a blur of fur.
Sam huffed. “One of them has my shoe!”
“Screw that,” Dean said, eyes narrowing. “The other one took my Twizzlers.”
They nearly knocked each other over in their rush toward the porch.
---
Fifteen minutes later they returned to the condo empty-handed, flopped onto the couch, and stared out the now closed sliding door as they caught their breath.
Sam winced from time to time, fingers going to his ear occasionally, and Dean waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore, didn’t care if Sam called him a mother hen.
“Ear okay?”
Sam nodded. “Yeah. Just stings a little.” As Dean leaned forward to check, Sam ducked his head away. “Dude. It’s not infected. Chill.”
“Ingrate,” Dean muttered, more tired than irked. They went back to staring out the door. “If it falls off overnight, don’t blame me.”
A snort, and then a long sigh. “This isn’t turning out as relaxing as I hoped.”
“Tell me about it.” Dean scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’d totally ask for my money back. Except, you know, we didn’t pay for any of this.”
“Yeah.” Sam’s next words were mournful, a kid who’d dropped his ice cream cone. “I only have one shoe now.”
Dean nodded, and frowned as he waved toward the kitchen. “I don’t have anymore candy.”
A moment passed, heavy sighs filling the room like balloons being slowly emptied of air. Dean took advantage of the quiet to consider the past several hours and ponder what might happen next.
He nudged Sam. “Hey. I have an idea.”
---
An hour later they were in a musty motel room, stretched out on narrow, lumpy beds with scratchy sheets. Highway traffic noise filtered through the cheap, thin windows. Sam’s soft snores rode just above it.
Dean smiled, closed his eyes, and drifted to sleep.
---
End
August 2008